When I Came Home To A Well-Lit House

(Or … Wait … I’m Gay?)

There’s been much talk as of late in the blogosphere with queers commenting on when they realized “they knew” … when their bright shiny unicorn buried deep inside of them decided to make itself known.

The funny thing is I think I knew from a very early age. My parents had a lot to deal with when I came along. I was their first, and I was as precocious as all fuck, too. I was speaking full sentences by the age of two. Language came easily to me. By the time I was in the third grade I was testing out with a college level vocabulary.

I mean, how many kids did you know that used facetious in a sentence … (CORRECTLY) while on the playground?! My inner unicorn was LOUD n’ PROUD before there was such a thing. Okay, maybe Stonewall had happened by then. But in my little backwater east county suburb of a conservative Navy town like San Diego, there were no two ways about it – I was odd.

BIG ol’ rainbow shooting out my ass Unicorn odd.

Mom said my dad always knew about me – even before I was born. Now, mind you, this was before they used the term gay, so this had to be a fairly odd conversation to have between my uber Catholic mother and my reservation born n’ bred father. But somehow they got through it.

So I have often pondered, when the subject came up, just when I knew I was that way.

While I don’t think I thought of boys sexually from the time I was six or seven, I knew that boys held a certain fascination for me. I didn’t want to run around and rough house play like they did. No, I wanted to let them do that and then come back to the play house the girls were using so I could make them dinner and stuff. I like taking care of guys – always have. But not mother them … it wasn’t like that. At least not the way I saw it.

So while I can certainly point to moments in my young queer boy life that said I was solidly in the boy-of-the-month card carrying fan club, it didn’t take on any sexual context until puberty hit. Until then it was just very strong feelings I had for the boys around me. Girls were someone you could talk to and connect emotionally about stuff. That was about the extent of my need or use for them. Nice to chat with, laugh with, watch boys with, but beyond that they got a big ol’ shrug out of me. And let’s be honest, they were the competition as far as I was concerned.

But boy howdy did I gush about some of the boys in my school. Vincent, Gregory, Bobby (yes, that Bobby who I grew up with and I’ve written about here on the Quill before), Bob (another Robert in my life – there were many of them – it was a popular name, I guess). There were so many of them over the years. Neil … Jesus, on the fucking mountain … Neil! Junior high crush of the fucking year! And the dude was packing – jussayin. You bet your ass I looked. Okay, I’ll put that memory away for now. It’s probably better for this post that I do.

So yeah, I can definitely say that I knew I was different from other boys (who were interested in girls) from a very early age.

I can recall that as a five year old my gayness factor skyrocketed (even if I didn’t really have a word for it) when I saw Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. I don’t know why the first line she uttered began to define my fey ways, but it did. Barbra became a goddess to me – even back then. Hell, she still is now. Even as cliche as that sounds.

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So when did the sexuality of it all come about? When did I realize that what I wanted from boys could be more than gushy feelings? When did I realize that what I felt was … gay?

That’s simple. I know exactly when it happened.

At around 5:30pm on the Merv Griffin Show and the guest? Donna Summer.

The song? Love to Love You, Baby

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It was 1976 and I was twelve. But for a gayboy like me to hear a song that unabashedly sexual in nature sorta reset my queer clock. For some reason the moans Donna poured into that song flipped that switch in me and I knew what those sounds she was making were about. I wouldn’t experience them for myself for another four years but – from her lips to my ears – I got it.

Thus began my love for dance music, Donna Summer (I was an epically huge fan – even met her on a couple of occasions) and my burgeoning gayness.

Side note: yeah, I remember the backlash against her when she supposedly said about gays and the bible. We all make mistakes and the truth of it is I saw for myself that she wasn’t that way. She spent enormous amounts of time speaking with gay men who still loved her but were dealing with HIV/AIDS and it was quite obvious that they were dealing with it. Donna only showed incredible compassion and love for a fan who it meant a great deal that they got to speak with her. So to the gays who kicked her unnecessarily during those dark days, I saw differently for myself. End of story.

I was often asked by straight guys (including my own father) I knew who were aware of my gay ways, why did I have such a fascination for women vocalists and dance (disco, soul, R&B, etc) music when most of them were listening to male rock singers?

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Well the dance music thing was fairly simple – being a QoC (Queer of Color) – my Latino blood pretty much dictated that dancing was in the cards for me. I probably came out of my mother’s womb dancing. Soul, R&B, disco, you name it … they were always a part of the musical tapestry in our home. Everyone in my family knew how to dance. I just did it with greater style – or so I was often told.

But the women singer thing … that’s a bit harder for me to nail. I suppose because I never really gave it any thought. I guess it was because they often sang about the men in their lives and those songs spoke to me. When France Joli (a lovely Canadian singer who I discovered that was around my age and had a career at the age of 15 just blew my socks off – God, how I love her) sang “Come To Me” I was right there with her. So much so, that when I wrote my first novel I made damned sure my main character Elliot Donahey heard her song when the love of his life, Marco Sforza, seduces him (in Angels of Mercy – Volume One: Elliot).

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These women sang about things that had started to make themselves known to a young gayboy like me. How my feelings for men – often unrequited – only served to make me yearn for them even more.

By the time I was twelve I already had a very large vinyl collection of disco, soul and R&B singers. And yeah, 98% of them were women. Sex sold, and as a hormonally flushed teenage boy, I was an avid buyer. These women gave me my young gayboy voice in those early formative years.

Don’t even bring up the duet between Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer in the Spring of 1979 … I lost my shit over that song for weeks. So much so that by the fourth or fifth week of my playing No More Tears (Enough is Enough) my mother pretty much said the same thing – “Enough already … play something else!” (The link below is a VERY RARE capture of the actual recording session where you can hear all of the harmonies between all of the singers – sans the music – truly an interesting version to listen to).

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So, instead of playing something else, as she suggested, I just put the headphones on and danced my ever-loving gayboy ass off.

Yet there was one album that defined how I saw romance as a gayboy. Again, it was Donna Summer who gave it to me: her seminal album, Once Upon A Time …

This concept album (which were all the rage in the late seventies and early eighties) is still on my absolute must haves. It had everything and said everything to me. I know that album backwards and forwards and every little nuance buried in between.

This album is everything to me. It was written by Donna Summer and her production team as a theater piece. There were talks along the way in her career of bringing it to the stage as a play. It would definitely work. While there are definitely dance numbers in this work, the scope of the songs is very broad. Some of the most interesting ballads I’ve ever heard exist on this album. For a young 13 year old this album wasn’t an easy sell for my parents. It was a double-length LP to begin with – which meant that it was EXPENSIVE. Nearly $20. In the late 1970s that was truly asking quite a lot. I had to bust my ass with chores around the house to scrounge up the cash. Lucky for me my birthday came along half way to my goal so I put it out there to anyone in my family who listened (and you can bet your ass I made DAMNED sure they heard me) that all I wanted was THAT ALBUM.

My parents came through for me. I got the album and disappeared from family life for the better part of that summer listening to it. We had a music room in our house and I’d go in there from the time I got up each morning and I’d dance, sing and strut my shit to this album as if I were on Broadway. Eating didn’t even enter my thoughts when I had that album on. I’d start in the morning and by the time I was ready for a breather it was dinner time. My mom always said that room would be steaming up like a sauna.

“Open some damned windows …”

I visualized the whole damned thing. I even invented a story I could weave to tie the songs together. No other album ignited my imagination (back then, or since) than that album. The music slightly dated in that late 1970s way (it was released in 1977) but I think they still hold up today. I hope that Donna’s daughter, Mimi, can realize this collection of songs on the stage at some point.

What I didn’t realize until now (as I write this post), is that this album also sparked my interest in storytelling. My interest in crafting a story around this concept album started it all. That is truly astounding that I didn’t put it together until now, nearly forty years later!

So maybe this whole gay thing was just my way to find my voice. My big gay unicorn voice. And somehow these bold women helped me sort that out when I was just so confused on why I felt what I was feeling. Boys rocked my world. They also were my worst nightmares. Music, escaping into that land of dance and song, is what kept me going. It’s where I licked wounds. It’s where I dreamt of boys to come, imagined love, lamented breakups that hadn’t happened yet but I knew would be coming my way. It’s where I crushed hard, where I sang and danced my ever loving ass off. So yeah, Love to Love You, Baby is where it began for me. That’s when my fascination with boys became real. It’s when it all started to make sense. And that feeling is what kept me dancing.

Even now, I catch myself dancing to a tune from that era … and that little gayboy me still is in there wiggling away – still hopeful, still wanting to find his way in Boytown, USA. Last Dance hasn’t been called. I still got plenty moves in me yet. Dance on, lil gay unicorn, dance on.